14 DAY TRIAL // The American space agency is celebrating Christmas in its own way, by having some of its spacecraft send back new images of targets such as stellar nurseries and gas giants. The NASA/ESA Cassini mission and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) are the most important such probes.
Cassini is without a doubt one of the most important missions NASA ever sent to the solar system. Since achieving orbital injection around Saturn, on July 1, 2004, it has been constantly providing us with new data on the gas giant, its ring systems and its moons.
The image it sent home for the holidays depicts Titan, the largest moon in the solar system, and one of the few places where life could potentially develop, other than Earth. The more astronomers learn about it, the more mysterious and unusual it tends to become.
In this photo, Titan is seen backdropped by Saturn, in natural colors. The moon Dione is also visible far in the background. Cassini flew past both of them a few days ago, snapping a bunch of images as it went along.
As an interesting note, spring is currently coming to Titan's northern hemisphere. It will continue to do so over the next few years, with summer scheduled to begin in 2017. If everything pans out according to plan, Cassini will be there to see it happen.
“As another year traveling this magnificent sector of our solar system draws to a close, all of us on Cassini wish all of you a very happy and peaceful holiday season,” Space Science Institute (SSI) Cassini imaging team leader Carolyn Porco says, quoted by Space.
The second image comes from WISE, which managed to image a stellar nursery that looks just like a Christmas ornament. The object can be found in the Perseus constellation, and is called Barnard 3. The star HD 278942 lies right at its core.
This object is also the primary light source illuminating the massive dust and gas cloud all around it. This particular photo was collected using multiple wavelengths of infrared light, at 3.4, 4.6, 12 and 22 microns. Each band is assigned its own color.
WISE was decommissioned in February this year, after being launched in December 2009. But astronomers only managed to browse through a small portion of the data the telescope sent back in the meantime.